The Benefits of a Heart Broken Over Time
by secondmezzanine
Summary: The way Barney sees it, there are three benefits to having his heart slowly, excruciatingly broken by Robin Scherbatsky.


**Disclaimer**: Sadly, I own nothing.  
**Spoilers**: Spoilers through 4.12, "Benefits."

**Author's Notes**: This episode absolutely killed me, in such wonderful, heartbreaking, awf-some ways. How could I not respond to it?!

**The Benefits of A Heart Broken Over Time**

The way Barney sees it, there are three benefits to having his heart slowly, excruciatingly broken by Robin Scherbatsky.

_One_.

It's a slow thing, a gradual thing, and the little shards of… whatever it is, what feels like a broken bottle pressing slowly into his lungs, can only do so much damage at a time.

If it were quick, Robin would see how hard he's fallen. Instead of breaking little by little, he'd probably have an embarrassing breakdown right in front of her, before he had the chance to calmly walk out of the room and go purchase an expensive electronic device to smash.

And the longer he keeps his secret-- and the more he wants to tell her, feels like he _has_ to tell her or he'll combust right there some night at McClaren's, leaving nothing but a suit and a scotch glass behind-- the more he sees he can never, ever tell her. He just has to wait for it to fade, and the only trouble there is that he doesn't want it to fade. He's come to prefer that broken bottle in his chest over the memory of the absolute nothing he felt for years.

Probably when they go out for tacos at a taquería together, she doesn't notice that he only eats half his before he feels like he can't pretend he's hungry anymore. Probably she doesn't notice how he's gripping that tiny packet of hot sauce so hard, the little foil edges actually cut a tiny sliver in his palm. Probably she doesn't notice that he hasn't been able to look at her, not even when-- _especially_ not when-- she got a tiny dollop of sour cream on her nose. It's so damn adorable he wants to punch himself in the face just to put himself out of his whiny little, nauseatingly heartsick misery.

And when he remembers she might find a black eye a little too sexy to handle, he has to sit on his hands to keep from punching out his own lights in the middle of the taquería.

So at least it's slow. At least she isn't drop kicking that bottle into his heart, ending it all in one fell swoop, Shannon-style. If bittersweet misery—god, look what she's done to his vocabulary—he's using words like _dollop_ and _bittersweet_—is all she's going to give him, fine. He might as well enjoy the pain.

_Two_.

Barney thinks, if he hasn't lost all perspective (which, considering the fact that he bought an extra pillow and blanket on the nonexistent chance that Robin might stay over some night, he probably _has_ lost), his best friend might actually understand better this way.

Oh, he denied it. Ted asked flat out if Barney was in love with Robin, and he denied it—it wasn't quite _sixteen no's_ but it was damn near it—but still, he got the feeling Ted wasn't horrified by the idea. And if this weren't a slow, slow death, Barney isn't sure he'd have the strength to keep pretending. But he'll keep pretending. For awhile. Mostly because he has to, it's just self-preservation, but also because he knows eventually Ted's going to see through him and he wants Ted to know he never meant for this to happen, if he could have stopped it early on, he would have, but he's in too deep now.

That's why he keeps thinking about that almost-smile in Ted's voice when he asked Barney whether he was in love with Robin. Ted's come a long way from the junk-punching anger he'd exhibited in the limo back in April, back when Barney had looked at Robin one day and everything had changed.

And it's that little change in Ted's voice, and that little nudge in Barney's head saying _if Ted's not junk-punching you, he might even be okay with this whole Robin thing_, that makes Barney stop outside the taquería. Wait, he tells Robin, I'll be right back. He runs back inside and asks for an order of tacos de camaron to go. He remembers Ted likes extra hot sauce, so he asks for that too. Ted will probably feign confusion over why Barney's been acting so strange, cleaning their apartment and bringing him Mexican food and twitching, twitching, twitching at the mention of Robin's name, but whatever.

Because the thing about having your heart broken, Barney knows (and he doesn't know much about love, except this), is that when it's all over, as this is inevitably going to be, you still need someone to eat tacos with.

_Three_.

He's starting to believe in contradictions.

With a swift breakup—also known as an unceremonious _dumping_-- there isn't a lot of grey area. At least, there wasn't with Shannon. It was black and white—together, happy, believing in love one day. Alone, snotty and miserable, believing in nothing but suits and sex the next.

With Robin, it's nothing _but_ grey area. Or maybe it's just that they're on such opposite ends of the whole black-white spectrum, they make some kind of grey mixture. Or maybe, he thinks on his walk home (it never fails he can't get a cab when it's snowing this hard), he's thinking about this way too much, because suddenly he's picturing them both as little splotches of black and white paint on a canvas and it's all so ridiculous that he starts laughing, letting every deep breath of January air stab him a little deeper.

So they're hot and cold, black and white, two conflicting thoughts existing in the same little city. Robin's either oblivious (which seems likely, and yet how she hasn't seen it, he'll never understand) or too afraid to fall in love—or hell, even sleep with—a friend again, and Barney's falling harder with every heartbreaking smile she sends him.

And contradictions aren't such a bad thing. The old Barney, awesome, carefree-Barney, contradicts with the new one, but the new Barney gets to be in love with Robin… which is another conflicting thought, he realizes as he slips on a patch of icy sidewalk, because doesn't he hate this whole love thing? Regardless, the old Barney seems to be gone. The old Barney would have given up alcohol, dear _god_, before telling a woman he loved her.

And there he had been that night, before the taquería, Barney goddamn Stinson standing in front of a woman and just saying it out loud. I love you. He's crossing the street to his building when it occurs to him that this should all feel dream-like, or nightmare-like, considering that she hadn't realized he was being serious in the least, but it doesn't. It should feel like that broken bottle smashing up inside him, but it doesn't. It should feel like _sixteen no's_ and the way she tried to set him up with a sure-thing waitress the night he almost _told_ her and maybe a city bus crashing into him all over again, but it just… doesn't.

It feels like this awesome, awful kind of freedom in knowing she's never going to get it, never going to say it back. "_Awes-ful_," he thinks as he's taking the elevator to his apartment, and grins at the memory of how she had said it. He doesn't want the scales to tip either way, because being free of her would mean taking a step backward, back to the former him, "_that guy_," as he'd once called it, and he's not sure that lovesick-Barney is any worse than awesome-Barney was.

No, he doesn't want to be free of her. He's said it aloud now, felt the rush of that awes-ful freedom, and saying it again would probably mean the end of all things Barney-and-Robin.

So he'll just think it, and _only_ think it, from now on, even if she confides in him over tacos, even if she gets sour cream on her nose, even if Ted's voice has that I'm-okay-with-it smiling edge, even if there's the most miniscule chance things might be more awesome than awful, even if this feeling threatens to annihilate his every molecule, because he _loves_ her, he loves her, he loves her.


End file.
